I stared down at the blade of my sword, lost. I went down, and down again, gazing at the layers of my construct. As we’d spent weeks and months plumbing the depths of Simon’s floating labyrinth, I’d been spending my spare moments working on my sword. We were now at the point where any one of us could memorise multiple decks of cards in mere minutes, among other feats of memory. Not like Simon, though. Never like Simon. The guy’s memory operated on a level I couldn’t even begin to conceive.

  But I was feeling frazzled. Like my mind was somehow fragmenting. I didn’t really have a real life any more, apart from eating, sleeping, and exercising, all my time was being poured into the project: thought-casting. It was as though this had somehow become a war. The unlimited, trans-human utopia had not yet materialised, and everyday was another day in the trenches. It was seriously tempting to get out altogether.

  I’m a game-caster. I’m used to spending hours in VR. But thought-casting is different. More like reality, somehow. I still knew what reality was, but I somehow felt like the lines were beginning to blur. I kept staring down at the blade of my sword. Maybe I hoped it would keep me grounded.

  We were back waiting where it all began, in the Chamber of the Seven Minds. Waiting for Winsford. Always waiting for Winsford. At last, he arrived.

  “Ladies. Gentlemen. We’re tired. You’ve done some hard yards. You’ve given everything I’ve asked of you and more. I salute you. But now the time has come.” We all looked up at him.

  “As we’ve mentioned previously, the next stage in our plan is simple enough in theory: we are going to be heading down into the subconscious. We don’t know what we’ll find, and we don’t know how thought-casting technology will engage with the subconscious mind. What we do have is a way in. Many ways in, in fact, you just have to know where to look for them. Sophie.”

  Sophie the psychologist stepped forward, pushing her half-rim glasses up her very appealing nose.

  She smiled faintly, then glanced around the circle before speaking. “The subconscious isn’t a separate place—it’s more like a background process, always running, always shaping what we think is our conscious experience. It stores memory fragments, suppressed emotion, unresolved conflicts—and it often processes not in words, but in symbols, images, feelings, and instincts.” She paused for a moment.

  “When you bring thought-casting into the equation, you're essentially giving form to your thoughts in real time. When we enter the realm of the subconscious, our theory is that – to some extent or another – your subconscious mind may cast constructs, or effect VR environments, in... unexpected ways. We call it ‘deep-casting.’ Of course, your subconscious may do nothing at all, we just don’t know yet. Deep-cast theory aside, we are confident that it won’t effect your conscious ability to thought-cast in any event. Because of this, you will always be able to maintain control over anything that your subconscious throws at you. Of course, your avatar also can’t be killed, so there’s no actual danger here.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “Having said that, the subconscious doesn’t follow logic or instruction—it follows association, fear, and desire. So when you're deep-casting, you're not just building with what you intend—you’re building with everything you are, even the parts you’ve forgotten, tried to bury, or just plain old don’t know about.”

  “How do you enter the subconscious in here? And how do you get out?” Ross piped up.

  “In thought-casting environments, the subconscious leaks through the cracks. To fully enter a subconscious deep-casting space, all you have to do is find one of the cracks and step through. Portals aren’t particularly personal, they’re universal patterns or common symbols that seem to show up across users. Things like blurry family photographs, staircases that lead down to an unintended basement, even static on a screen or unintentional doors. The portals are anomalies, shared glitches in the mental code, pressure points between the conscious and subconscious terrain. Anyone can find them if they’re paying attention. You would have already seen dozens of them during your time here.”

  “But what about getting out?” Ross said.

  “For reasons we don’t yet quite understand, you can’t strictly will yourself out of deep-casting like you can in normal thought-casting. But it is easy enough, you simply have to return to the portal where you entered, and step back out.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do we need to explore the subconscious mind? How does it help us achieve anything?”

  “The subconscious isn’t just a vault of buried fears or unresolved memories. It’s the raw substrate of the self. It’s an engine of creativity, intuition, and, potentially, transcendence. If consciousness is the interface, then the subconscious could be thought of as the source code. By learning to cast from that level, we believe it may be possible not just to understand consciousness, but to duplicate it—split it, recombine it, even distribute it across multiple streams of awareness. This is where theories of post-human cognition begin: not by uploading the mind, but by reformatting it from the inside out. And if we can manipulate that architecture directly, we’re not just talking about simulation anymore—we’re talking about rewriting the human condition.”

  “Transcendence” Winsford broke in. “This is where we set sail for the next frontier. Is it daunting? Yes. But which explorer didn’t take risks to discover new lands?”

  It wasn’t so much that I was captured by Winsford’s vision, I was skeptical to be honest. But I couldn’t deny that the possibility of exploring the subconscious mind intrigued me. Part of me wanted to know if Winsford could be right. Was there a higher power in the universe? Or was reality ours to make of it whatever we could? Was it possible to escape death? I guess that is the big one. If there was even a chance that Winsford could unravel that mystery, I had to know. But mostly, it was just the mystery itself. What would we find down there? For better or worse, at this point, I decided, I was all in.